Friday, November 06, 2009

Another arguement against democracy

While few people would describe Forbes magazine as the most politically neutral of publications, this article on interstate migration away from high tax states to lower tax states highlights one of the consequences of excessive government spending leading to ever higher taxes leading to disincentives to immigrate, disincentives to invest and incentives to exit the high tax regime as and when you can. When the civil servants decide to blow the taxpayers' contributions on themselves, it only makes a bad situation worse.

I have to wonder what US national emigration figures would look like if the US stopped the draconian practice of taxing its non-resident citizens.

The situation is bad enough in Hong Kong where the civil servants are demanding a 2% pay raise - compared to current average increases in the private sector of 0.6%. Given that the civil servants already earn substantially more than equivalent private sector employees, work less hours and have practically no risk of being laid off this is outrageous. I hate to think what would happen if we had full democracy and the politicians started to pander to the majority of the population who are net takers from the taxpayers' contributions.